Akwasi Agyemang, CEO of GTA
The Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA) has organized a day’s sensitization workshop and exhibition on Covid-19 guidelines and protocols for tourism and hospitality industry players in the Cape Coast Metropolis and its environs.
The move was to get them abreast with industry-specific Covid-19 preventive protocols in preparation for the re-opening of businesses after the easing of the Covid-19 restrictions by the government.
The Regional Manager of the GTA took participants through the general and industry-specific guidelines and preventive protocols and encouraged them to provide regular staff training on the required PPE and their effective use.
He said the GTA would continue to engage and monitor the activities of industry players to ensure that they complied with the guidelines and protocols to prevent the spread of the pandemic.
Mr Kwamena Duncan, Central Regional Minister, in a speech read on his behalf by Mr Bless Kwame Darkey, Chief Budget Analyst at the Regional Coordinating Council, said more must be done in a coordinated manner to open up the tourism economy.
He noted that the hospitality industry had been the most affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and that the position of the Central Region as the tourism hub of the country was under siege.
According to him, the pandemic had wreaked havoc on the industry for which the socioeconomic life of the region, and for that matter, the central business of Cape Coast had been badly affected.
He described the training workshop as apt and crucial to the survival of the local economy and encouraged participants to take it seriously.
He encouraged the hospitality industry players to take advantage of the opportunities abound in the period of the Covid-19 and come out with innovative ideas that would benefit the country.
On his part, Dr. Kwabena Sarpong, Deputy Central Regional Director of the Ghana Health Service (GHS) in charge of Public Health, advised hotels and other hospitality facilities to add symptoms screening to the checking of temperature for clients.
This, he explained would help them to know the state of any visitor that came to their facility.
Dr. Sarpong stressed that considering the rate of the spread of the virus, hospitality industry players and its stakeholders alike needed to put in place strict measures and abide by the national Covid-19 protocols in their operations.
He underscored the importance of the workshop to the safe operations of the hospitality industry and emphasized the need for them to understand the Covid-19 preventive protocols and the specific measures to take as part of the re-opening of their various facilities and business units.
He added that the industry players needed to train their staff for them to know about the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the steps to adopt to ensure that both staff and clients were safe from the virus.
Dr Sarpong advised the hotels to liaise with the district health directorate in their jurisdictions and ensure that they were connected to a health facility for which they could call in case they had a suspected Covid-19 case.